TL;DR
Base has great potential as a hub for Web3 games, as it allows for scaling and is growing steadily, and has the advantage of being connected with Coinbase. Within the Base ecosystem–which will gain added attention from its Onchain Summer event, and may also benefit from the future releases of Coinbase’s Smart Wallet–some top gaming and sports-related projects to be aware of include Heroes of Mavia, Chibi Clash, Aavegotchi Gaming, Fren Pet, and BetBase.
Gaming is a strong crypto use case, but with so many different ecosystems, which chain is it best to focus on? While there isn’t one network that stands out clearly above all others, sometimes it’s best to pay attention to ecosystems in their early stages, and in that case, Base Web3 games have solid potential.
Why Base?
As Base was developed by Coinbase, it has strong foundations and backing, a large user base from the exchange to potentially tap into, and it’s showing consistent growth. What’s more, the Coinbase Smart Wallet–which is expected to be very user-friendly–is incoming soon, and Base’s second Onchain Summer event will be running from June to August, bringing added attention to the chain.
Base Web3 Games
While Base has huge amounts of potential, the reality is that gaming on Base is still a niche area. This means there aren’t yet large numbers of games opting to develop on Base, but with a couple of big names in place, along with some smaller, more experimental projects, the numbers can grow. For now then, let’s start with the current projects leading the way.
Heroes of Mavia
The biggest gaming project on Base, and well known in the entire Web3 gaming space, is Heroes of Mavia. This is a mobile-based strategy game that incorporates its own tokens–Ruby, Sapphire, and MAVIA–with Ruby and Sapphire used in the game, and MAVIA having utility as the project’s governance token and, effectively, as a way for traders to speculate on the project, as the token trades on CEXes including Kucoin and Bybit, and DEXes such as Uniswap and the Base-native Aerodrome.
The game also uses NFTs for land and in-game items, and has its own newly-built marketplace, which recently hit 20,000 transactions.
Heroes of Mavia launched in January this year and released its MAVIA token on Ethereum, but soon announced that it would be building on Base, as the Layer-2 allows for better scaling. This means MAVIA tokens can now be bridged across from Ethereum to Base, and the game’s NFTs are minted and traded on Base.
Currently, while this a solidly playable game, it remains to be seen whether the crypto components can be integrated in a meaningful way, and this is reflected in token and NFT prices, which have been on downward trends. On the other hand though, Heroes of Mavia has now hit over 4 million downloads globally, so there is clear potential.
Chibi Clash
Having launched an NFT land sale at the end of May with influential Web3 gaming platform Xterio, Chibi Clash looks set to be a major project on Base. It’s marketed as a fantasy gaming universe, meaning it will actually contain multiple interconnected games, taking in survival, combat, and strategic world-building. Also, Chibi Clash makes a point of putting its use of generative AI front and center, at a time when there’s a huge amount of hype and expectation around AI capabilities.
The project incorporates NFTs minted on Base, with land-holding and farming as key parts of the gameplay, and will operate around a governance token called CLASH, which will also power the in-game economy.
Aavegotchi Gaming
A unique protocol that brings together NFTs, gaming and DeFi, Aavegotchi first launched on Ethereum mainnet back in 2021, later moved onto Polygon, and launched its Aavegotchi Game Center–a hub for games launching on the Aavegotchi protocol–last September.
Although Aavegotchi is not officially related to Aave (the DeFi protocol), it did receive an Aave Ecosystem Grant, and was advised by Aave founder Stani Kulechov.
Overall, Aavegotchi is a big name connected with various overlapping crypto sectors, and in March, it announced that it would be making use of Base as the settlement layer for its incoming new expansion: a Layer-3 called Gotchichain that is dedicated to Aavegotchi gaming. And last month, there was a further announcement that the protocol’s token, GHST, could be bridged across to Base.
If there’s one criticism to be made of Aavegotchi, it’s that it’s too complex and multi-layered to make immediate sense to casual newcomers, and so maybe it’s one for crypto-natives experienced with NFTs and DeFi, rather than for gamers looking to play with crypto.
Fren Pet
If you’re looking for something minimal and offbeat, then Fren Pet might be of interest. Like Aavegotchi, it takes inspiration from the Tamagotchi electronic pets of the nineties, but in this case the platform mechanics are not overly complex. That means you’ll be taking care of a retro-looking pixelated pet, staking, interacting and battling, completing quests, and earning points and tokens.
You need ETH on Base to get started, but when you join, you can mint a pet for free, and it’s easy to get going. Also, Fren Pet integrates crypto with regular payment methods, and with Web2 social media and email accounts. All in all then, if you were picking a gamified indie app to onboard new users to Base, then Fren Pet might be a good choice.
BetBase
Finally, let’s expand our scope beyond video games to also take in decentralized betting platform BetBase. The plan here is to include sports betting, prediction markets, and online poker, all done entirely on-chain using Base, which BetBase believes “will become the ultimate consumer chain.”
And to be fair, if there’s one pastime that unites both non-crypto and crypto-native crowds, it’s gambling, which is hugely popular across the board. BetBase still looks early, but with Base Onchain Summer coinciding with the UEFA Euro 24 soccer tournament, the timing might be right for it to expand.
